The Roots of Lisp

For nearly two decades I was a diehard LISP advocate. I even forced all my programers to code three Crash Bandicoot and four Jak & Daxter games in custom LISP dialects that I wrote the compilers for (an article on one here http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ban...). But by the mid 2000s I started doing the kind of programming I used to do in LISP in Ruby. It's not that Ruby is a better language, but mostly it was the momentum factor and the…

> In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry. One could argue that Church's (1930s) lambda calculus, which underlies LISP, is a closer analogue to Euclid's distillation of the essence of Geometry. With the minimal addition of pure binary IO, the lambda calculus is easily transformed into an untyped programming language [1]. On the other hand, full blown and richly typed pure functional programming languages like Haskell…

One note of interest about pg's source code is that the dot functions (and., pair., etc...) are based in the host Lisp and not `eval.`. The implications are that pg's functions can take advantage of lexical scope, whereas McCarthy's original Lisp was dynamically scoped. This will make a huge difference if you are so inclined to use pg's code to do some hardcore Lisp anthropology. I did so a few years back using pg's code and it was a blast…